How Firefox Got Fast Again
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome.
Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.
I don't remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused all tracking in the Activity Controls page. I also stopped signing in to the Google account in Chrome.
This is why I'm a big supporter of EU's "explicit consent" idea. I should be knowing stuff like that without having to read a 5-page privacy policy that's often hidden somewhere on the Help page.
Speaking of Firefox, version 57 also makes it easier to enable Tracking Protection in settings now (before you had to switch to the private windows to benefit from it, although you could make it so that FF always opened private windows by default).
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/07/firefox-57-full-tracking-p...
You can download FF57 from their FTP servers (they published it today), if you can't wait for the auto-update tomorrow:
I suppose it has benefit now with Android, and multiple devices, but Google, and Youtube both started saving searches long before the release of Chrome.
Quite terrible.
Firefox is more secure than Chrome, but it's not very secure. The sad thing is that it used to be more secure and Mozilla deliberately weakened their security.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that we should be careful about saving passwords in Firefox if we could be the target of a National Security Letter from the US. The attack would be detectable, so it cannot be used very often (and they would need a really good excuse for doing so).
By contrast, Google takes all our data and can do whatever they want with it, without a warrant/NSL?
I have no idea why so many downvotes. Can anyone disagree that a system in which Mozilla is able to decrypt user data is insecure?
One note: the attack is not necessarily detectable, unless you are in the practice of verifying the JavaScript you receive for each page. If there were some public registry of hashed versions of Mozilla-served JavaScript, it would be detectable.
Also, you need not worry only about the U.S. government, but also about any government which can compel Mozilla to act, and any government which can compel an employee of Mozilla to act, and finally any employees at Mozilla with access. And also you need to worry about bugs in Mozilla's JavaScript: since they did not design a system in which they can't know your password (which is the key to all your secrets), an implementation error might send them your password (and thus allow them to decrypt all your secrets).
People get annoyed of being told x-y-z is not secure, while not being offered any practical solution, especially if the risk/probability of attack is low.
(I'm assuming Firefox has a good reason for working the way it does, but I guess the first step would be to have more documentation about that.)
Which can themselves be compromised. The old Firefox Sync protocol was immune to remote compromise, completely and totally.
> People get annoyed of being told x-y-z is not secure, while not being offered any practical solution
I agree: the problem is that there was a practical solution: just keep the old Sync protocol.
> I'm assuming Firefox has a good reason for working the way it does
The short version is that people wanted to be able to only have one device and still get at their data, and Mozilla didn't want to confuse them by separating their account passwords and their sync passwords. Never mind that combining them has results in a wholesale loss of security.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277
"When you sign in to Chrome, your info is saved to your Google Account so you can get it whenever you need it."
It is literally the first sentence. I also support some of the various EU privacy initiatives but I don't support them because I think users should be militantly ignorant about what they're doing.
If you are logged in you Google account, every Google search will end up in your Google history. It doesn't matter if you search from Chrome's omnibox, google.com or Firefox's search bar.
Does Chrome also uploads search made with other search engines? That would be a bit more worrisome. Though considering that Firefox saves your history in your "Firefox Sync" account, I wouldn't be surprised if Google did the same.
Chrome is specifically designed to do the opposite: Google explicitly states that when you sign into Chrome, "your experience in other Google products is personalized by including your Chrome history with your Web & App Activity." (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)
And interestingly, you could have a page showing your search history with Firefox sync just like with Google. Just because a page shows you private data doesn't mean someone else has access to it, and the more common opposite is also true.
(Note, that while the password and key derived from it never normally leave the brwser, the login page is served from the network. So, you trust Mozilla's servers to not get hacked and serve you insecure login page.)
The system also has a notion of "class A" storage, where Mozilla knows the key (called kA), but AFAIK nothing ever used that. Maybe its already gone.
Oh, the device names (and types - like desktop vs android) are not encrypted. Probably because of attempts to add push updates (normally, sync is just polling for updates). And the profile data too (not a part of Sync at all - its Accounts).
Google has optional client-side (also, E2E) encryption, for some types of the data (e.g. passwords and autofill data). One has to opt in explicitly. When opted in, data is encrypted with a key that's is derived form a passphrase you provide (and sync implementations would error and ask you for the passphrase). I'm not sure, but IIRC protocol has provisions that allow to not encrypt some data at client's (= Chrome's) discretion, as the encrypted flag is set per-object. I'm not aware if this is used or not - was a very long while since I've looked at their sync server implementation.
That said, for E2E encryption both system have feature parity, but Mozilla's one has it by design and Google's one only as an opt-in.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=web_app_...
but i think i'll stick with 56 as my default browser for a little longer since quantum breaks some great legacy add-ons:
* NoScript -- control script execution
* RequestPolicy (and its variants) -- control content requests
* Blend In -- use the most common user agent string
It won't be quite full-featured yet, though. He's planning that for Firefox 59, which will be the next Extended Support Release and what Tor Browser will be based on (which needs NoScript).
There's a handful of compatible user-agent switchers already...
It'll set the user agent to the same as the Tor browser, Firefox 52.
If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified.
This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't remember, but IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an excellent browser compared with its competition. Market dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does not matter much for as long as Google controls its implementation and distribution.
Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.
Now don't get me wrong, it is true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that doesn't matter that much, because they can always turn and you can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors — like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating pining.
They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost battles after they ended up in Chrome.
I just love that the web community actually thinks about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and nonstandard behavior on the different browsers.
Recently, I have moved into desktop development (using Qt and GTK+), and it is atrocious just how difficult it is to deploy a non-trivially sized native application on the three common operating systems. I really wish that the desktop development community could have unified around a similar set of standards for all the OSes when it comes to desktop applications too.
The web application platform is painful in several ways too, but I think they have nailed it with attention to standards compliance and weeding-out monopolistic behavior
Different system libraries, different window management environments and user expectations for layout and interaction, different handling of hi-dpi displays, different filesystems with different filename restrictions and different handling of filename encodings, different application packaging, different code signing and sandboxing requirements, different package distribution mechanisms. I've probably missed a few, but those cover some memorable enough annoyances for me in recent years.
I don't enjoy web development, but I do enjoy web publication and distribution.
They keep making it more and more like Chrome. If I wanted to use Chrome, I would. It's gotten to bloat maximum.
It's slow as hell. It's less flexible and less easy to personalize. They have broken some of my favorite add-ons.
This piece is pure propaganda.
It does break some extensions, but many have converted. Which are you having trouble with? The main one I'm missing is "Disable Ctrl+Q".
My notes: https://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2017-10-05-webextensions-supp...
My main objection is still the sheer size and the amount of memory it takes, and the continual feature creep to make it more and more like Chrome. I know I'm in the minority, and also that it's heresy to say anything bad about Mozilla here. Oh well.
I only wish I had lots of money and/or time so I could help revive the development of xombrero, but at least it's still available.
Other options for Vim-like web extensions are Saka key, Vim-Vixen and Tridactyl.
The regular Firefox is much slower than Chrome still. The nightly is now noticeably faster than Chrome.
The current stable release 56 just can't compare to chrome.
Apparently they have decided 57 is stable already but plan to make it official tomorrow.
From my unscientific testing, 57 is only as fast as chrome, while the nightly (59) seems to be faster than chrome. They should have waited until 59 was stable.
I would be using the nightly as my main browser if I didn't have experience with crashes and bugs with nightly versions before.
Which brings me to my other point (which I always keep hammering on in browser threads): why don't 3rd-party browser focus more on battery? If you're on Windows, Edge is king in battery use. On macOS, its Safari. On Linux, none (but then Linux doesn't have good power management in general). We live in a mobile-first world these days, why not focus browser development there?
Edit: I'm not dissing the Firefox or Chrome team their efforts, but almost all the news articles or blogs I see speak about Chrome or Firefox getting faster. And they do, by significant jumps. But when there are battery improvements, they are usually pretty middling (say 10-20m more battery life). So all I'm saying: why not flip the focus?
There are reasonable answers -- Safari's extensions aren't quite as capable as the other two, so it's possible you're relying on an extension that Safari doesn't have and can never duplicate, and of course if you need to sync bookmarks and other browser data across OS platforms, Safari falls down in the way all iCloud-backed apps do. But Safari does focus a lot on battery conservation, and if you're on a laptop that can make a big difference. And, while I'm sure there are benchmarks out there to quibble over, in practice Safari seems to be just as fast and just as compliant as Chrome and Firefox are.
I've been using Safari as my main web browser for years without feeling like I'm missing out on either performance or killer features. I keep copies of Firefox and Chrome around and keep them up to date, mostly for web site testing purposes; neither of them have added features compelling enough to make me want to switch back. I doubt Firefox 57 is likely to change that equation, although I'm happy to hear that they've got their groove back, as it were.
I love Firefox, and owning an iMac I'm not terribly concerned about the power efficiency difference between the two - but damn if it isn't convenient to have the ability to just pick up where I left off.
I don't have a laptop, but will when the Qualcomm Snapdragon Windows10 machines land, and will probably use Edge exclusively there.
It's important to watch where incentives run. Google has the incentive to profit from you. Microsoft and Apple have the incentive to make sure your browser and device work as efficiently and well together as possible. Mozilla focuses on privacy as their main feature.
How do FF users do this?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
But not at the same time, which is a showstopper to me (still using Firefox Nightly as main browser).
I've been using Firefox this way for over a year, 2 instances open right now.
Compared to ProfileManager, Container Tabs are absolutely awesome. Completely different experience, smooth and nice.
The solution for me was to use one Firefox installation per profile: primary = stable, secondary = nightly.
Container tabs are way nicer than this, but since I open lots of tabs, I still like the distinction between stable and nightly (stable = regular browsing, nightly = FB).
Containers splits them out beautifully, with minimal tracking.
With Chrome / Chromium, Google wants you to log-in using a Google account, so you fall into the trap again.
Google of course has all the information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that (you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect Google to use browser fingerprinting to track you when logged out in a different browser, but I'm not sure about web activity in Chrome. Sounds plausible either way.
My question is independent of container tabs, it's a question of whether we know the level of tracking Google does on a signed-in chrome where your google account is not signed in in the session (is this even possible?)
But personally I certainly don't need to be logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than having to go about deleting it (or not because there's so many other things to get distracted by)
Entire or not, does Google analytics apply here?
I'm happily using DDG as a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need to stop using GMail.
If your use case is not covered, you surely can write a WebExtension to provide the functionality. Containers as well as sync are exposed in the API.
Also, changing a container's color does not change the color shown on existing tabs.
Container settings (names, colors, icons, assignments) should be synced (if not, please file a bug). Open tabs will be synced, not sure how they will open on another machine (considering URL-to-Container assignments should be synced, they should open in the respective containers – maybe there's a possible improvement here).
I expect the different Cookie stores to be synced as well, if not, that's a bug.
It's good even for creating fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective of different user sessions etc.
- Profiles
- Containers
- Persona tabs
?
Really? I can configure two personas to go through two different proxies? I can disable javascript in one and leave it enabled in the other?
Those are features I need in Containers, but as far as I've been able to read, they aren't present and there are no plans to allow for them.
It was locking out journalists drafting stories!
How can you trust Google anymore? There's something rotten festering in Mountain View.
Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments? If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?
Because the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any of several thousand tools.
Corporate censorship is entirely under your control. You can always stop the censorship by simply not saying it using that corporation's tools. Corporations can control how you say something, but not what you say. Governments can control the act of saying it. One is far worse than the other.
Easier or more difficult to get by without shouldn't distract us from the core point GP made, that corporate (arbitrary) censorship, with no redress, should be taken as seriously as govt censorship. These days they are just two arms on the same chimera.
The answer is: groups of people (and corporations are groups of people) are free to limit speech according to whatever rules the group decides upon. What you're proposing is that certain large corporations be treated as quasi-governmental entities. Which is a _free-speech restriction_.
Not saying it's a bad idea, necessarily. But I'd rather my freedom to say that certain types of speech are unacceptable was guaranteed.
My point is censorship is a huge responsibility and power, especially when it is done at the scale govts and multi-national corps do, and therefore it needs serious transparency and checks and balances, in both cases.
I don't see this happening to satisfaction. Instances of regrettable censorship stay regrettable, and keep recurring.
I just can't quite go as far as to say that Google or Facebook should be treated as governmental entities. The bill of rights restricts what government can do. It has never been interpreted as restricting what an individual person can do, even if that person heads a giant corporation.
Solve these problems another way, not by literally nationalizing social media.
Again, by all means, protest Google/Amazon/Facebook. I'd love to see the state of affairs change too. Just don't pretend like missing your church bulletin is equivalent to actual imprisonment.
Everybody understood implicitly that you only put in your own information. Giving away other people's personal information to a some company for which it is clearly valuable is not considered nice. It's simply not yours to give away. For the few who didn't understand this most companies had this in their terms of service anyway, as there could be legal risks involved.
All those companies are gone now. They are out-competed by a select few very large companies who did everything possible to make it very easy for people to input everyone else's contact information in their database, including making that behaviour default in the software that ships with your phone. In the beginning you could ask people nicely not to input all your personal info in third party phone book services. That's not really possible anymore.
The days when you could practically opt out of these companies are long gone.
Because one of these organizations can throw you into a cage to be raped and tortured for the rest of your life, and the other can deny you access to some fairly useful web apps.
There is already a case where private companies can't shut down their service to you as they wish, it's utilities (water, electricity, gas). I hope we can recognize at some point that Internet access should count as a utility too, and some core services like email service too.
Any power that you take away from (comparatively weak, subject to competition) Google by giving it to (already terrifyingly powerful and monopolistic) USG is not a move in the right direction.
There are other email services which offer what people want. Want people are proposing is imposing their will on Google and the people that run it, even though there is competition out there that people could use instead and get what they want. Gmail and Google Apps are far from the only options people have, and far from the only free options people have. But if it is so important that people have an email address, then the USG could actually offer that (I've long thought the USPS should offer verified email addresses with strict spam protection by aggressively pursuing violators). Otherwise, let people pay what they want for the level of assurance they want.
The other side of this argument is that there are some things we do want to enforce companies do, such as offer a base level of health care in a package. I support this as well, because that solves an endemic problem where people have restricted choice and it also hurts society as a whole. That is, I think Hobby Lobby should have to provide birth control in their health plans because of the reasons outlined above, but I don't think any non governmental service provider that isn't a monopoly (and Google isn't a monopoly in cloud apps, even if there is an argument that can be made about them being one in search) should have to adhere to dictates about what what content they must allow on their service. That's a pretty slippery slope in my view.
Because you have choice of what to use. You don't always (or even often) have choice of what country to live in, and there's not a lot of unclaimed land that's hospitable. Some people may want a service they know the operators of will be proactive about keeping certain content off. Others will want a service that makes it their goal to not do that and protect everything on it. Choice is key here, and the government stipulating what needs to be done is actually restrictive, not freeing (you're just imposing your own views on others systematically). When there isn't a choice of what service/product to use, that's when other laws may come into effect. Anti-trust laws.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/31/google-docs-users-locked...
This sounds like one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" no-win solutions for Google. Users (and Google) don't want Google to allow people to use Google Docs to distribute malware and harvest passwords, they don't want someone at Google to look at their documents to see if they are "safe" (which Google couldn't realistically do even if they wanted to), so then people got upset when the automated software Google uses to look for these problems did a bad job for some people.
While it'd be nice if every system and process worked well 100% of the time and had no bugs, that's just not a realistic expectation.
The new panel containers are also handy. They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.
But containers don't have separate extensions, bookmarks and history so they can't completely replace profiles.
So at least until then, about:profiles is no replacement for using the -P command-line switch to start the profile manager.
Using multiple profiles seamlessly is one area Firefox can and should seriously improve, or Chrome's "User" feature will always have the edge.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile
Also don't forget to add -no-remote option to each of the links to enable starting such browsers in parallel. Sadly it's not mentioned behind the URL above.
Firefox needs to improve on Chrome here. The erstwhile "Profile Switcher" addon provided a nice UI but is sadly gone after the WebExtensions transition and I cannot find an equivalent so far.
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
Middle-clicking or Ctrl+clicking the New Tab button does inherit the current container. It also opens the new tab to the right of the current tab instead of at the far right of the tab strip. These actions are one in the same, so any extension that opens a tab to the right of the current tab (like Always Right or All Tabs Helper) also make the tab inherit the current container.
It's strange that such a useful feature is barely advertised at all in the UI, but it's there.
But your other criticisms of using containers as profiles are spot-on.
Anyone know how to make the windows visually distinct?
Don't do that. On one hand you mix work and personal related issues (not recommended) on the other hand it makes it easier to track you (as your accounts can be correlated). As a dev I have my own (personal, work, ...) users/accounts even at home (if I do remote) to separate the stuff - maybe that's paranoid, but for me it was great to improve work-life balance.
Chrome supports multiple profiles, which may optionally be associated with a Google account. Firefox has the same thing, minus the Google account.
Syncing extensions and browsing history is not something I feel I need.
You could always try tweeting him. He's also on HN.
DISCLOSURE: I work for Mozilla, and Pocket in particular.
I also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel free to reuse if appropriate for you:
We’ve seen at least one situation recently where a user “signed in” to Chrome when prompted, which brought that user’s personal bookmarks and website logins onto their work computer. While Chrome offers this as an option, there are no situations where your personal account should be linked to a browser at work – if you need to be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy and security as well as for the practice – we want to not have your personal data on our systems, and you don’t want your private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to anyone else who happens to be at your desk while you’ve stepped away.
If you have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove that connection using the instructions below.
You can check whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on the small person icon at the top right corner of the window – just to the left of the “X” to close the window. • If you click on that and it asks you to sign in, you’re not linked to an account. • If you click on that and it lists a personal account, click on “Manage People” to open a new window listing connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in the top right corner – click those and “Remove this person” • If you see a name rather than a generic person icon, click on that and use “Manage People” to remove that connected account.
Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this that would have required creating a Firefox account to use Firefox Sync. If you have done this with Firefox please disconnect it; if you’re not sure then you almost certainly haven’t done this in Firefox and don’t need to worry about it.
LOL
So the offence was merely having porn bookmarks in their browser - not visiting porn sites at work? Wow.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the person whose account it was didn't even know that bookmarks exist in Chrome - it's not like Google makes it obvious these days. I suspect there were some awkward discussions at home that evening, or possibly on the phone with college-age children.
Of course, if someone is signing into their personal account using work hardware, they're basically saying they trust the company not to do any intrusive monitoring, where "intrusive" is something I'm deliberately leaving a bit vague. The company probably has some idea what sites they visit but employees expect that the company is not stealing their credentials or having someone virtually read over their shoulder without a very good reason. If outside intruders get into work device management servers and such, employees' personal stuff is at risk also, but they're willing to accept this for the sake of convenience.
I have, on my work-owned laptop, both work and personal Chrome profiles. (The analogous Firefox feature is multi-account containers.) I might only bring a work laptop when traveling for work. Most of the time, and certainly if I'm presenting during a meeting, I'm using the work profile. I'll use the other only when I'm alone. I lock my screen when I'm not there; I have sensitive access, so this is expected for reasons other than protecting my personal data.
Conversely, work allows me to access my work email and some other internal sites from my personal phone if I agree to certain device management restrictions. I do this rather than carry two phones. Some people choose otherwise.
Once upon a time that was the case - "Cyber Monday" as a prime case in point. Some limited amount of non-work browsing is generally still fine at most offices I deal with, most notably checking news, weather, sports scores, etc.
However as a person responsible for making sure there are no breaches (particularly reportable ones) at offices, I'm moving more and more to the "No personal use. Period. No debate." position. I can control the kind of filtering, AV checks and attachments that come into the office via the business email as an example, but if people are checking their personal email on company systems I may not be able to catch the "Huh, I don't remember ordering from them, I wonder what this invoice email is all about?" person. Antivirus is all well and good but it's not 100%, and while I can look at the mail filters and see that there were 400 PDFs with variations of "Delivery Notification" or "Invoice 1234567" blocked in the last half hour to a ton of different addresses, Jane Smith in Billing or Accounts Payable may only see one or two - and on a really bad day, opening just one may be all it takes.
Also, these days a huge percentage of people not only have smartphones but use those smartphones as their primary devices for Internet access. 5 years ago that wasn't the case, but now? George with the iPhone 7 Plus can quite easily check his email or do plenty of other things that would have been much less pleasant on an iPhone 4.
Wouldn't Jane Smith from Accounts Payable anyway open a PDF invoice email, regardless of the address?
about:profiles gives you the same functionality as Chrome's profiles; it's just a bit harder to discover.
Ok, I spend my life filling in captchas, but to me that’s a signal that it is working and Google aren’t overly sure who I am.
firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &
Create different profiles[2] for each separate browser you need, and then make shortcuts to launch them.[3] Each Firefox profile will work like a completely separate browser.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
Here's something I find curious.
When Apple does it, it's because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it's because they're saints.
How am I able to reconcile these two?
It's like reviews on Amazon. You skim the highs and the lows and you read the rest. People who say Apple is killing the open web are at the extreme. Skim what they say just to be familiar with their argument, but be careful not to get sucked in.
Please let me increase "content process count" higher than 7. Chrome opens hundreds of child-processes (no problem at all on my PC).
And I am still keeping an older Firefox 48 around, as it's the last version that runs Firebug and other good but now unsupported addons. Firebug had this "DOM" panel which showed the non-default DOM attributes in a different color and showed them as first few entries, and the rest below. The DevTools in new Firefox has a less useful DOM panel (it shows all attributes not grouped or colored differently, makes the DOM panel useless and chaotic) - please improve the DOM panel to be feature-equalent to the old Firebug DOM panel!!
One thing they have been doing very well is allowing history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes.
Right now I use Chrome everywhere because :
- It feels pretty fast (I still have to try the new FF)
- Any replacement needs to come with an extension covering this feature and working across all my OSes.
Haven't tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.
In order to switch, both FF desktop and mobile need to be better than Chrome.
Does FF support a version of Chrome tabs too ?
Damn, they have built themselves a good moat just with features I will miss.
That's asking a lot (chrome does not do that AFAIK) but that's the only way to allow me to use multiple browsers on different devices fluidly (and also to continue using chrome where it has an edge, like on mobile with chrome tabs)
(I'm the Chrome DevTools tech writer / advocate)
All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.
It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw "suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich).
However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (the UI feels slowish though on pre-2016 phones).
What do you mean?
First is that certain elements block scrolling. I use FF primarily for Facebook (since FF allows me to use my – shameless plug – idle-time faker extension [1]). If my scrolling thumb lands on the "Like" button of a post, the screen just stays put. So about 1/3 of my "scroll" gestures are in vain.
Second is that "flinging" motions don't register very well with Firefox. With Chrome, "flinging" sends the web page flying at a predictable speed; with Firefox, it lags for a fraction of a second before scrolling at a random speed which is usually much slower than that in Chrome. It's as if Firefox doesn't register the final thumb flick of a "fling", but Chrome does. Since "flinging" is my primary method of browsing longer web pages, ultimately my thumb has to physically do more work, and gets exhausted more quickly, when using Firefox than Chrome.
A third nitpick is that, while (non-flinging) page scrolling keeps up with my thumb, it does so in a jerky manner, like it can't quite keep up with rendering, or it doesn't see all the touch events. Reminds me of an old PDA. In contrast, scrolling in Chrome is very smooth. This looks ugly but I could live with it.
It is the first to two issues that prevent me from using Firefox on Android for anything but Facebook.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/social-networ...
Google Play store link for Firefox Nightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
- when you swipe fast, the page only scrolls by like 30%, instead of scrolling by 200% like in Chromium browsers. Basically it's impossible to quickly scroll a long page on Firefox (maybe it's configurable somehow in about:config?)
- when you long-press a link, it takes like 2-3 seconds for the menu to open. As I "open in new tab" by default, this quickly adds up.
Firefox for Android also allows browser extensions, which gives some control of the software back to the user.
Link for the other if interested: https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/
Edit: from the link content, I understand they actually backtracked from this proposal after a backlash from publishers.
The tagline of giving the option to either disable ads or replace ads is to provide a way to enjoy an ad-free experience or to receive only optimized advertisements.
A big reason some users dislike ads isn't because of their entire existance but rather their tendency as of late to be malware-ridden or cause drops in webpage performance. These are the things that cause some users to enable ad-blockers, and Brave is the only way I've heard of that has pushed the envelope of a BETTER ad experience.
From their blog, the first is a great introduction to what Brave is about[1], as well as their response to an attack on their ad-replacement ideology[2].
[1]:https://www.brave.com/how-brave-works-for-you/
[2]:https://www.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-de...
Also a quote directly from Brave:
[The user interface] shows the major choices that Brave enables:
You’re game to try our default mode of operation, for a better ad-supported Web. Just leave the Replace Ads item checked. This is the default mode of operation. We insert ads after blocking without hurting page load speed, and those ads will support the sites you browse. We choose ads based on browser-private user data with no remote tracking — not even by our servers.
You want to block all ads and trackers, but you’re not sure about our plan to insert better ads with high performance and privacy. You can do this with Brave by checking Block Ads. We want you on board even if you’re just blocking everything.
You’d like to try Brave without ad blocking or replacing, to get whatever ads and trackers you would experience in other browsers. Check Allow Ads and Tracking. We still protect you with HTTPS Everywhere and other defense by default.AdBlock Plus also does something equivalent through their default option to show "Unobtrusive ads."
I switched to a better adblocker, so now I just whitelist sites whose ads I'm willing to see.
I read about it on their own website:
https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/
"Brave’s goal is to speed up the web, stop bad ads and pay publishers. One of the ways we plan to accomplish this is with ad replacements."
"Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads"
I find it quite interesting that Android even has all the interfaces and permissions to allow alternative launchers. What a great feature in this generally fairly locked-down space of non-PC OSes.
I tried several times, but ended up sticking to a sandbox (firejail) + uBlock Origin + HTTPS Everywhere.
I thought of making a script that updates that file automatically, but I can't say I've seen any ads on that laptop even without updating the file for months, so hasn't been my first priority.
It's been my second browser for Twitch and Netflix only for a while now. I'm bit even sure how useful that is anymore if I'm honest as I've not tried them in firefox for a while - but they used to be unusable and I've become accustomed to having another browser for them
They have features not in chrome and Visa versa. But to blindly switch means taking a productivity penalty, at least temporarily.
I found Electrolysis still quite slow. but the new engine ("Quantum"), is ridiculous fast. The last ~5 versions were such big improvements, that I even switched from Chrome. It's so good know that there is no need to keep Chrome. Firefox isn't good enough again, Firefox is the browser again.
I remember the early browsers as smaller programs that were oriented around retrieving content for further viewing/interaction using other applications. As I understood it, this was one of the ways that MIME was useful.
The problems with "modern" web browsing that annoy users probably have less to do with what, back then, would have been separate programs. They have more to do with the retrieval step. User have little control over 1. the content the browser requests and retrieves and 2. whether and how that content is processed (i.e. the "default settings" of the browser decide and to my knowledge few users today manually adjust MIME settings or whatever today's equivalent is). Because users today expect the browser to do everything. It is more than a user agent i.e. http client, it is an "all-in-one" program that can seemingly do anything. No auxiliary programs are needed. This comes at a cost. I would argue that cost includes many hassles that users experience, including "speed".
The point is that this blog post is talking about #2, the processing of retrieved content. But is that really what causes most of the user annoyances? Is that what ultimately affects "speed"?
Or could it be, at least in part, that some web page is controlling the web browser to have it make dozens upon dozens of DNS and HTTP requests, not only for tracking, but in some cases for "content" the user does not want.
The first task of the user agent, #1, to retrieve content, is not nearly as complex as the second, #2. It probably has not changed much since the early days of the www. (I still use original netcat from 1996 as well as other 1990's tcp clients to great effect.) Retrieval of content can be user controlled. The complexity is manageable. The "user agent" can be small, open source and easily compiled by the user. And with todays memory and networking retrieval can be very fast.
When I think of a "user agent" I think of a tcp or http client, a small program that can make TCP connections and HTTP requests, not one that is also a graphics rendering engine, a video player, a programming language interpreter or a PDF viewer, etc.
It is the disappearance of the MIME idea in favor of a highly complex, all-in-one application called a "modern web browser" that is at the source of every known problem I can think of that is associated with "modern web browsers" today, whether it is browser "speed" or privacy or security or whatever. It is the price one must pay for not having separate programs with separate privileges to accomplish separate tasks.
IMO the problem is not the kitchen sink nature of web browsers, the problem is the kitchen sink nature of the web itself. It needs to be split into functionally separate parts that can be interfaced with different programs and workflows, instead of being a huge, integrated 'web' that is in turn parsed by a similarly huge, integrated program, the browser.
So, literally, I still use Chrome (because I'm too used to it), but I do all my dev work on Firefox, which has a dev-friendly user policy.
Where do you see the search bar being removed? I can't see any announcements, I don't think it's going away. Also, I don't think the combined bar is missing functionalities, at least not the one you're describing.
On Firefox Developer Edition 58, in the menu you can choose between :
Use the address bar for search and navigation
or
Add search bar in toolbar
This decides between combining the address bar and search bar into one, or having a separate address bar and search bar. You can also pick a keyword for each search engine.
Even if you decide to use the combined bar, I just tried adding "+ddg" keyword[1] on Duck Duck Go and type "+ddg test" and it searched for "test" on Duck Duck Go instead of my default search engine.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
Even if it's the extension fault, why they aren't sandboxed properly, or even why there eisn't basic reporting about the offenders boggles my mind. Maybe it's because of the API... I find it hard to believe it isn't possible to retrofit some of that on the current design to be honest.
And now, because they couldn't handle it, we're getting extensions with crippled power, that are very (very) far away from feature parity with the old ones.
I wasn't happy before, and I'm not happy now, albeit for different reason.
The fact that I'm using Firefox of course means I'm not thinking too much of other browsers. The fact an extension in chrome can't add a frigging sidebar is a personal pet peeve of mine.
I remember when Firefox was the lightweight alternative to Internet Explorer 6...
That said, I don't know if Quantum fixes the specific memory leaks you have, adds (back?) the extension hooks you miss, or adds the reporting you're looking for.
I leave Firefox open for months on end without problem and with several hundred of tabs open, multiple windows too. I do use a tab unloader, that unloads an inactive tab after a while. Its precisely because of this that other browsers are not suitable for me
I have exactly the same problem as the one you replied to.
It seems like some resources never get cleaned up, so if I in the span of a day open 100 tabs and close them then I will not end up with much higher memory usage than initially.
I have investigated this with about:memory and while not seeing something conclusive I did sometimes see domains taking up memory which were not loaded in any tab (ghost windows) or high amounts of memory used for "media".
I will try disabling the handful of addons I use beside uBlock Origin which is too essential to disable.
Never had such an issue with Chrome, but man FF57 is my new default. SO FAST. I don't care if I need to restart it this thing is awesome.
I really like the built in free VPN that Opera provides.
* that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the World Wide Web!
* ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser; those guys went on to become CS PhDs doing microprocessor research)
* ...And then that moment being surpassed when IE4 came out in '97 and I couldn't imagine what a faster browser could be or do.
* ...And then that moment when FF 1 came out in '04 and I thought this is incredible, Netscape is alive!! and kicked IE's a55 and me thinking the "browser wars" are over
* ...And then that moment when Google Chrome came out and I went "who needs another browser??" and then switching wholesale to it in short order
* ...Many moments in between thinking "Wow, the browser wars really are over in my lifetime"
* ...And that moment 2 weeks ago when I installed Firefox Quantum beta (Firefox??) and went "Holy crap, this thing is FAST!" and then switched all my browsers everywhere to it. To a beta browser.
It sure is a good time to be a nerd.
Keep up the great work moz://a
PS - edited to reformat
I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I work on code that wasn’t designed that way I force my brain to think like the CPU instead of in terms of little elves with different job... Not sure if anyone else has experienced this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like FF engineer’s might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency refactors.
Also, I had never previously seen the code cartoons produced by @linclark...but now seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a fan!
I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!
Examples and PDF downloads (!): https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs...
I wish those were still around when I was learning about pointers. Would have made things so much easier!
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...
Section beginning, "My next linguistical suggestion is more rigorous"...
Did I read that right?
"The point to get across is that if we have to demonstrate something about all the elements of a large set, it is hopelessly inefficient to deal with all the elements of the set individually: the efficient argument does not refer to individual elements at all and is carried out in terms of the set's definition."
I think about a lot of concepts in terms of real-world objects. When I'm in the shower looking at the tiles, that's an array -- how do I store my data there efficiently, and minimize the need to move blocks of tiles around? When I'm stuck in traffic, I'm the data in a network packet -- how do traffic engineers solve this problem? What's the software equivalent of a carpool lane, or a double-decker bus, or a side street? How is a stop sign different from a street light (latency versus throughput)? Layout constraints seem exactly like theatrical stage positions to me -- maybe that's why I find the Cassowary system perfectly intuitive, and CSS layout not at all.
I liken this to Einstein's thought experiments: what is the experience of riding on a photon at the speed of light? I find it tremendously useful, and I'm not sure why it seems to be more popular in physics than in computer science. Perhaps it's as simple (and arbitrary) as "Einstein was a fan, and Dijkstra was not."
Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...
Dark is the default for the Developer Edition, which is what you're thinking of. But Normal is the default for Stable. Light is almost the same as Normal, but with a few more elements in white.
Haven't seen any other black title bar on my Mac though...
One of the best thins in the new FF to me though (also macos). I still hope apple will to something to their gray ui. I'd love to have dark theme for the ui, not only for menubar and dock.
I was under the impression Apple didn't allow any web rendering engines on iOS except the one mobile Safari uses, thus Chrome, Firefox, etc, on iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine. Is that not the case anymore? It would be nice to see these speedups on iOS.
Some might say this is not much of an issue as most modern CPUs can handle 1080p, but actually pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs are too slow and power saving Intel CPUs Laptops are too slow too. So the only excuse might be, that nobody uses that open source OS, but especially from Mozilla I would not expect such an attitude towards open source software.
After installing 57, I went to Twitch and saw my cpu spike and MacBook drastically heat up. So it’s not just Linux.
I hope more Quantum/Servo stuff will solve all these issues soon.
I just want to ditch Google as much as I can. Now trying Safari for casual browsing, and using Chrome just for dev stuff.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823
Poor battery life on OSX
The main problem is that in order to have a benefit from decoding in the GPU, the frame needs to be displayed on the GPU without reading it into CPU-addressable memory.
The video frame needs to participate in the compositing of the whole Web page, which means the simpler approaches that video player-only apps can used aren't really available. Rather, it's necessary to be able to treat the video frame as some kind of OpenGL surface.
However, the Linux graphics drivers situation being as messy as it is, Firefox doesn't yet enable OpenGL compositing by default on Linux.
So getting Firefox to composite the Web page using OpenGL by default on Linux is the big prerequisite.
I don't work on graphics, so I don't really know what I'm talking about in this sentence, but I'm hopeful that Wayland will eventually force Linux into the Mac-like situation where some baseline of OpenGL support can be assumed to be available and working just because the windowing system wouldn't work otherwise.
Sadly, due to LTS distros, it will take a while for various legacy configurations to get upgraded out of the ecosystem.
So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past. Were those lies/incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?
That's why I find these sorts of announcements confusing, I can remember them saying that there are already as fast as Chrome several times in the past. But maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
They'd declare that the JS engine was just as fast (or faster) - but that didn't cover the whole of the UI, and laggy bits of the UI could slow things down no matter how fast the JS engine was.
Thankfully they now seem to have improved the whole UI.
https://arewefastyet.com/ refers specifically and only to Firefox's javascript engine. It runs js benchmarks only, not whole websites, and doesn't test responsiveness or rendering performance.
Javascript performance in firefox has been on par with competing browsers for a while now. The current initiative, called Quantum, is complementary to this effort. It is supposed to make the rest of the browser components fast, using among other things a new renderer, a CSS styling engine, and multiprocessing support.
Since the Quantum effort started, the JS team has prioritized perf work higher, so quite a bit of perf-related improvements have been made in Spidermonkey for 57 as well. (And Quantum DOM needed some rearchitecting to re-multithread the engine in a limited way.)
(Source: I work on Spidermonkey.)
Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.
Bloated websites (usually Google ones) would actually lock up the entire Firefox UI, and Windows would recognize the browser application as "Not responding" until the page finished loading. In the case of a super bloated site like the old Google+, that could be as much as twelve seconds non-responsive while all the cruft loaded up.
I am back on Firefox release channel now, and pretty satisfied with current performance, but looking forward to Quantum.
The whole issue of sites freezing and lagging without using Chrome is concerning, and it's not pushing me to use Chrome. I think that's Google's aim by creating that situation but I'm not budging.
It's pushing me to more native apps in both the iOS AppStore and Microsoft Store.
It's probably inevitable that shoving Node based apps into the market falls flat in favor of more efficient native code solutions due to mobile. I've been viewing Electron as a temporary stopgap with that in mind at least.
57, once it got closer to Beta, was the first version I could develop with.
As resources become more plentiful (available performance-units, whether delivered through faster software or faster hardware), demand counter-intuitively increase, in part because the cheaper per-unit price makes people feel they can use the resource more freely.
This phenomenon describes why no matter how fast our computers get, it's unlikely that they will ever be "fast enough".
So maybe give it another spin :)
- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.
- Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).
- The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).
I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-...) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point.
Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!
Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.
Firefox uses smooth scrolling, while Chrome always uses very jerky, jumping scrolling.
Have you tried disabling that?
I like the idea of switching to Firefox a lot, but from a performance perspective I’m not seeing quite what everyone else is.
I've measured the input latency and its ~3x slower than chrome.
Filed a bug around a month ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699
What's missing ?
Multiple profiles within a single window, visually distinguished by tab highlight color.
Create a new profile by going to about:profiles, and thereafter when you start Firefox it should present you with an option to pick which profile to use.
More options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
c:\apps\firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile "C:\profiles\some-clean-profile"
Knowing about
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini
Faster than old fox? Yes. Faster than Chrome? Nope. Still long way to go.
They should probably ditch all in-memory stuff, and just use the drive, so they can support those cases when you really want to have a "low millions of tabs open."
>Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable
True, thankfully we have extensions that deal with this (I've been using Keepin' Tabs for this, until I started using cVim)
When I have 20 open I already start to get confused about where stuff is...
* Firefox's Awesomebar (the address bar) is much more powerful. Whereas Chromes sends you to google mainly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
* Tree Style Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Thanks to Firefox's userChrome.css, you can pull pretty nice customized UIs even without any additional extensions :) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux/wiki/Custom-CSS-Twe...
I have 9 virtual desktops; I typically have browsers in 6-7 of them for various in-progress tasks. That's somewhere between 6 and 14 browser windows (I can fit two side by side on my screen), with multiple tabs in each.
Finding things is easy. Even ignoring the per-task categorization by desktop, Firefox lets you search all your tab titles/urls: just type "% " in the URL bar followed by your search string. If I'm looking for something specific, this is the simplest way to find it.
Smart Zoom and Handoff is completely missing and Applescript scripting support is extremely poor.
I'm generally optimistic about Rust code having fewer exploitable defects, although it's a reasonable argument to suggest that the previous C++ parts had a lot more public scrutiny.
Also, for me personally: I use a lot of different profiles and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess. The only UX that still works is about:profiles (all of the profile switcher extensions broke since the move to WebExtensions) and I've had Firefox beachball (hang -- I'm on macOS) on me twice while doing that.
Don't get me wrong! I love Firefox and I'm really excited about this change.
Not sure if it meets your use case, but checkout Firefox containers.
Containers only separate Cookies and login data, to make you look towards the internet like multiple people.
Profiles on the other hand separate everything, as if you had two completely independent Firefox installations. Different browsing history, bookmarks, themes, extensions.
They work very well for allowing multiple people to all have their own Firefox, even though it's the same installation. But also really well for single-person use, for example I have a normal Profile for everyday browsing and then a webdev Profile, where I don't put in content/tracking blockers.
You can manage Profiles by typing "about:profiles" into the URL bar or with this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
I'd love to talk to you more about the ergonomics of containers / profiles for your use case. You know how to reach me. :)
Thanks for that, I can now replace `chromium --temp-profile`.
1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair.
2. Hangouts for work. :(
3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, although both are kinda bad.
Except hangouts, none are deal breakers - I use firefox as much as I can, and in fact overall it feels more faster and more repsonsive than Chrome starting with Quantum. It also looks and feels better than chrome.
1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list.
2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative.
3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Keysnail. It requires the ability to override C-n, though.
hey callahad, thanks for shiming in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs also do not help here because they share the same history which I do not want for privacy reasons.
Nonetheless, thanks for a great release!
I may be misunderstanding what you mean, but I believe you actually can do that. If you navigate to about:profiles, there should be a "launch profile in new browser" button that runs multiple profiles at the same time, each in their own, isolated Firefox process.
To make this a bit easier, you can create desktop shortcuts which launch a specific profile like `firefox --new-instance --profile Work` (on Windows, use --no-remote instead of --new-instance).
LastPass please. I'm sure it's on your list already, and I'm sure they know about it too but every little helps.
I am happy to use pass/keepass (whatever version) but the family says only LastPass is acceptable.
for me, vimperator/pentadactyl and tab groups. i can't use a browser without them so i won't be upgrading :(
Chrome allows users to simultaneously run multiple profile instances, each with it own profile. Firefox didn't seem to support that.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... (or a similar addon) might bring me back to using Firefox.
With Chrome, one set up a profile shortcut to a given profile, and then all tabs/windows within the instance corresponded to the same profile. This meant hitting Ctrl+T to open new tabs, rather than having to click and dig through a menu to pick the right profile.
I'd like the containers addon to support easy shortcuts. Maybe on hitting ctrl+t, one can then press 1-5 (or some other selector) to determine which profile the new tab opens in. Alternatively, more safely and less confusingly, just having windows sticky to a specific profile, so all new tabs predictably open into the same profile.
The UX around multi-account containers is still being worked on, but the contextualIdentities WebExtension API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...) allows add-ons to interact with containers, so a third party developer could create exactly the experience you've requested.
about:profiles is not discoverable (obviously), easily usable (you have to restart), or easily switchable (you have to open about:profiles or the terminal).
By the technical definition of "UI", the raw filesystem and terminal counts, sure. Opaque and unknown about: pages count, sure. But that doesn't make it good.
For features like this the UI is the feature. about:profiles is not a good UI, so the feature is 80% useless.
There are also many features in Chrome that I’ve come to appreciate, such as right clicking a tab and selecting “duplicate”, which opens a copy of the tab and retains the browser history of the original one.
These kind of hidden features don't require a whole lot of designing and forethought, so it's something that usually only really needs one dev thinking that it'd be nifty to have them implement it.
FF 57 also has "duplicate tab" with duplicate history.
On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla's Speedometer 2.0 [1] test with Firefox 57.0. I get 90 on Chrome and 93 on Safari.
On my Surface Pro 4 that gap is smaller, but Chrome is still about 15% faster on that test.
In the case of Speedometer, it's measuring one specific type of webapp interaction in a single tab; it's not capturing things like perceived speed of opening or closing the browser, switching tabs, loading pages, etc. It doesn't test how the browser performs when many JS-heavy tabs are loaded in the background. It also has lots of corner cases: installing a common password manager halves the score, and a common adblocker nearly does the same again, yet neither show that kind of noticeable degradation in real-world browsing.
Benchmarks are useful for saying "we've improved our browser this much in this area compared to where we were last year," but they're much less useful for making broad generalizations across heterogeneous browsers; there are too many other variables at play.
While pieces of Firefox are moving to Rust the majority of attack surface is still in C++, so I want a strong sandbox if I'm going to run that browser.
It's described in detail here:
* https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox
* http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...
To my knowledge, the only bigger architectural difference now is that Chrome sandboxes each tab individually, unless they're from the same domain as another tab, whereas Firefox by default only uses as many processes as you have CPU cores and then round-robins your tabs among those.
This is for performance reasons: You still get almost the same parallelism, but much less RAM usage especially with lots of tabs, and then that free RAM can again be used to speed things up elsewhere.
You can however configure this. Set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to as many processes as you want to maximally use. If you set it to a really high number, like 1000, then it will create a new process for each tab (until you open your 1001st tab) and those will then all be individually sandboxed.
Another big security difference were extensions. Firefox previously with the classic Linux approach of "If it's installed, it's trusted".
Now they have the same extension model as Chrome with a number of additional APIs. Those APIs are potential security holes, but also allow the implementation of better security, for example NoScript is being ported to Firefox 57, still can't be ported to Chrome.
Well, and then going away from the model itself, Mozilla enables much better security on the extension side, again with the Linux approach, by reviewing extensions and extension updates before they allow the publication. I'd have no concern with my mum installing whatever extension she wants in her Firefox. With Chrome, I would be concerned.
Lastly, only some of us are security super humans. Chrome always gives an option for security to calm security people, but if it benefits Google, they'll leave this option off by default, even if it should clearly be default on.
For example Sync in Firefox is end-to-end-encrypted by default. Only one password needed. In Chrome, it's not. Because Google wants to evaluate your browsing history, bookmarks etc. You can have E2EE, but you need to separately enable it and use a second password for it.
Again, fine for security super humans, but the fewest of us understand browsers enough to know about all potential security holes and we simply do need to rely on browser vendors for our own security.
Don't think Google has actually fixed that Auto-Fill phishing attack either yet, which comes up around here every half year or so.
Few things that I do prefer in Firefox:
- bookmarks with tags
- nightly/testmode snooze tabs. Wonderful idea
- reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays)
I don't use containers even though they seem lovely
As far as I can tell, Firefox, Safari and Edge all seem to have it, and Chrome does not. Not on mobile, and not on desktop.
There are some extensions that accomplish the same. I've had some good (but very limited) experience using Mercury Viewer some time ago: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/okn...
I would still argue that its function is different than the "reader view" functions of other browsers, but it does have it.
Also sometimes this "reader view" looks worse then the original. It has too small font for my taste. When you pinch to zoom it looks like it changes the font size, but also the viewport. So it is entirely useless.
I expect that it will be removed (or replaced) in future.
Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share.
Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.
Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.
Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with privacy-aware users and/or power users.
To that end, they need to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-up with Chrome.
It would be like using Tor all the time. You know it's better, but the difference in speed is so great, that you have to make a conscious choice. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits _without_ compromising speed.
Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise consider how Chrome has occupied an IE like market share despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta between Firefox and IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox peaked at a much lower marketshare than Chrome's today.
Which means it won't be an alternative anymore and it will die.
Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already.
It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.
The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.
If Mozilla's goal is to strengthen the interests of a wide range of users against the narrow interests of two or three oligopolists they have to consider entering the OS game in spite of the immense difficulties.
If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome.
Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/
It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).
If I use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts.
I far prefer FF even on mobile.
But their mobile marketshare is totally irrelevant compared to Chrome, UCBrowser or the Samsung browser (even this one alone has about as many users as Fx Desktop).
That said, more market share for Fennec would be nice.
(This comment written in Fennec.)
I don't mind that some people want to keep focusing on desktop products, they have their use. But I think it's not what Mozilla should focus on if they want to "promote internet for everyone".
I've noticed that a lot of folks don't realize there are a bunch more devtools tabs that you can enable hidden in the settings (including a shader editor, a canvas debugger, and a DOM inspector). They're less useful than the main four (inspector/console/debugger/network) but are pretty neat and help a lot.
Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and where it is now is where it has almost always been.
In this case, I think Firefox made a good choice in modernising the codebase and the extension APIs. In 2 years we'll find out if the vim people were right or they were indulging in hyperbole.
Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1
Here's the request for a better keyboard API (referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2 years with no end in sight: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
I'm sure the new FF is going to make some users happy, but as you said, having your workflow broken is quite painful, and the Mozilla team has known about this for years but still not made the upgrade path bearable.
Except an already developed patch and proposal that needs some time from the main devs to be reviewed. For a long time they were very busy making FF bearable for 90% of the users. Now that it's released we'll see if this issue is as stuck as you imply.
We power users are like 1-2% of all FF users. I think it's acceptable to break some things for a while to bring back much more users than that.
Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.
I am dealing with it. I moved to a different browser.
> Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.
Simply not true.
This is a restriction for chrome-store extensions. You can install one manually without with "feature"
Some of these things can be done in other browsers using third party extensions, but I am extremely reluctant when it comes to third party extensions for security reasons.
[Edit] Very important to me as well is built-in reader view.
Several things immediately come to mind:
* Mozilla is a more trustworthy company than Google, so all things being equal, I'll take their product.
* Container tabs (or multi-account tabs now) are a killer feature for privacy and greatly improve the "multi profile" use case
* Firefox Mobile allows extensions, where Chrome doesn't support it.
The only negative for me with FF is that in the enterprise, FF Kerberos/SSO function seems inferior to Chrome, which "just works".
But for it being closed source, I think Vivaldi is a better experience than Chrome. Sure it's "just" a reskin, but point is, Chrome is in 3rd place in my opinion.
The other thing I'm trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm sticking with it for the moment.
The "bumpier path" is that they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-like addons (aka WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still have some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web development so m going be slightly affected with this release, i hope the performance gains are worth it.
What addons are you missing for webdev?
Personally, the extension I miss the most is vimperator. Mainly the fact it worked everywhere. Now you land on new tab page (or about:*) and the extension just won't load. The highlight features would be macros (automating some signin and signup workflows) and quickmarks - opens a predefined page in precisely 3 keypresses. With the way WebExtensions are right now in Firefox, a quickmarks feature just won't work sometimes, which is very irritating.
I'm assuming the Chrome code suffers from the same issues the FF did/does: you simply don't shoehorn in shared memory concurrency in some nontrivial piece of C++ code.
Mozilla threw some serious research and time at the problem. Is Google doing that too? Or are they confident enough that Chrome will be fast enough in the future without major architectural refactoring?
I am already using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.
I don't think focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the last time a non-technical person I know complained about browser speed beyond a website itself being slow.
I agree though, that rendering performance is not the bottleneck of the browsing experience.
Even with 50+ tabs open in Chrome, it still loads uncached pages 2-3 seconds faster than FF Quantum, with fewer flashes of unstyled content as well.
I had high hopes for this refactor, but it looks like I'll have to wait to switch browsers until the speed really beats Chrome.
But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up native support development[1] 2. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508
For a Wikipedia search, you'd set the keyword to "w" and then you'd get the identical behaviour you have in Chrome when typing "w foo" in your Awesome Bar.
Such as "!w term" for Wikipedia, "!a someitem" for Amazon, "!yt video name" for YouTube etc. Also see "!g term" for Google and/or "!s term" for Startpage, Google without tracking.
I noticed it on DDG searches and couldn't figure a way to remove it. The "App Store for Search Engines" seemed super overkill, I just want to specify my URLs without the indentifier tags, like I can in chrom{e,ium}.
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/22/how-to-use-dynamic-bookmar...
The various channels, like Quantum to stay on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy to understand as a user and hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important info. Plus a native dark theme, yay!
One thing that remains is performance of Youtube. For some reason HD videos start crushing the processor after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.
I wish there were a community effort to build a true native Firefox version, instead of trying to recreate standard Mac behaviors.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-...
[2] https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling...
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
Shoving webextensions down everyone's throat, and only afterwards starting to work on implementing APIs and giving anyone a chance to start working on porting stuff. No thanks.
1) Firefox does not import Chrome logins and passwords. Major pain.
2) Firefox freezes when importing Chrome history and bookmarks. I get a "script is taking too long" message. If I force close and reopen, then try to delete the partially imported content, it freezes as well with the same message. Tried deleting profile and restarting restarting to no avail.
3) (more of a nuisance than a real issue) I need to use the same browser on all devices so that everything is in sync. Google Search in Firefox Android looks like a page from the 90s and is missing Search Tools. Maybe Google isn't playing nice?
Did people migrating from Chrome experience issues 1) and 2)? Tried the initial import on Linux and macOS, same issue.
The whole story reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the Google homepage, once said.
They worked their asses off to get the page smaller and smaller so the UX was unbeatable. Then, after they got enough users, they focused on different things, and more and more stuff was included.
Somehow Firefox went the same way, right?
First they created it so it would be small, fast and modular, then it got bloated to the max and now they set it on a diet again.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer Mozilla to Google, and I like that they even explored experimental stuff like Rust and Servo to get on the right track again.
But for how long?
- A newbie developer adds small feature, triggering some performance test that was already close to failing. Now newbie has to learn all about the performance of this large project before they can land their first change.
- The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to get it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person.
- The product is something like Microsoft Excel, that has a strong guarantee of backwards compatibility across a wide variety of hardware and OS versions that are difficult to test. Asking developers to delete code from parts of the product they're not experts in, is likely to break stuff.
This is a tricky thing to deal with - (imo, again) how you deal with this is twofold:
1.) The automated test that measures performance needs to be rock solid - whatever you measure needs to be deterministic. Wall-clock time isn't always the way to go (although it's the easiest), maybe you profile and measure cpu cycles consumed by your application.
2.) If you capture performance over time then hopefully you can capture a trend-line that shows performance degrading from other changes that push the app past the performance bar. If your dev loop is fast enough you can isolate performance degradations to a small set of changes. Ideally if you handle #1 above this won't be much of an issue. In my experience changes that tank performance usually do so beyond the threshold of noise.
Regarding "newbie developer needs to learn all about performance" and "asking developers to delete code", that's why you need organizational buy-off. If your changes are regressing performance in a core area that is complex with a lot of legacy, maybe you shouldn't be making changes there, or the org needs to be aware of and sign off on letting your change go through. It doesn't always need to be a hard and fast "reject all changes", but there needs to be a discussion.
They are all real smart people.
I just have the fear they will forget about it in a few years again.
> we’re adding lots of new tracking, including improvements to CI automation running performance tests, telemetry to track what users experience, and regression management inside of bugs.
I'm saying, what prohibits them in the future from stopping to care again?
Of the ones that have updated, most are missing significant features. The most significant example is Lastpass, which can no longer fill in http authentication boxes, and can't even copy usernames and passwords to the clipboard anymore. (The Chrome version has never been able to do the former, but can at least do the latter.) Lastpass fills many auth modals for me every day, so losing that feature is going to be a huge annoyance.
NzbFox is gone. Hilarious webcomic manager gone. Foxyproxy missing features. This just sucks. I understand the logic behind this move, but addons were one of Firefox's strengths. Now it appears they will be a sort of poor cousin to their Chrome counterparts. I would happily sacrifice speed to not completely hamstring the capabilities of addons.
Obviously it's too late for this, but the could have added the WebExtension system to provide greater stability, security, and developer ease for new addons (and those that wished to migrate), while maintaining the more powerful system for major things that required those capabilities. Yes, in theory it means a bad addon could compromise security, but that's true of any program I choose to install on my computer. I certainly wouldn't trade my general purpose PC for some locked down app store box regardless!
Too bad Mozilla changed the Add-On website a few days ago. You don't see any indication of supported Firefox version anymore. You only see the extensions that work in your current browser, not the extensions for the next version. (Unless you switch to the old layout in an link hidden in the footer.)
Some extensions will be delayed because the deadline (2 years?) wasn't long enough. Some extensions need additional features and may only be available with Firefox 58 or later. Some never.
And you need to invest some time to research this. One starting point is https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
Not on the new site and not if you are using Firefox 56. You need to click on "View classic desktop site" in the footer. Then you see a "Compatible with Firefox 57+" tag/badge right from the version number of the extension.
My bad.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278
Mouse gestures are critically important to me, so I'm sticking with Vivaldi until this is fixed.
Been running Firefox for my personal browsing almost exclusively for years (with the occasional Chrome use) but I still can't ditch Chrome for work because of a few add-ons that don't work in Firefox - mainly Mixmax.
Up until this point I always felt that there was no good Google free alternatives for chrome mobile browser, but this perception has definitely change now with the new Firefox Beta build.
I am switching to Firefox nightly for my default Android browser now.
I mean, a five year old phone isn't top of the line anymore, but if other browsers work just fine, I'm reasonably sure where the blame lies...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...
And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 "friends." And she doesn't have big "subscriptions" list in Youtube.
So it's completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using the most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that the most common sites are unusable.
So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.
Maybe it's because she doesn't have a newly bought computer, which are the ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don't use Facebook and Youtube?
I also use Firefox but spend zero time in Facebook and minimal time on Youtube and block Javascript wherever I can, so I don't see the same. But I saw the CPU on her computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is doing. The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent is spent in kernel according to the task manager. Both cores are used more than 90 percent, and the Firefox is not responsive. She doesn't do anything more than scrolling down her Facebook to see that effect. It's not always that bad, obviously depends on the content on the Facebook, but it's bad often enough for her to see the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain to me.
What I personally observe is the pages embedding more linked Youtube videos got to be very slow to even display them. Those are the pages I stumble on occasionally, so I didn't investigate. The second effect I've observed is writing a longer post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive) the longer the post is. Like writing these words now.
So, dear Firefox people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a "normal" user using the "normal" Facebook and Youtube.
(Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one will remain available soon when they turn off the support for what they mark as "legacy" extensions. That is really strange decision, deciding to remove the major difference between them and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for extensions and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)
From the less used ones, as an example I've used "Copy Plain Text 2." Now I see there's a new similar and compatible extension by somebody else I guess, but it's obviously more limited: "Note: WebExtension API does not allow setting Copy PlainText as the default copy function of the browser at the moment, neither does it allow user defined keyboard shorts. Once there are such an APIs, I will add the feature."
Others have no replacements at all, not surprising seeing the limitations even for the simple "Copy Plain Text."
(Edit: regarding performance details see my other posts here.)
It's really as bad as it can be.
It's really bad.
Regarding addons, I'd say give it time. It's a chicken and egg problem that will be solved with time. I was not expecting to switch until end of the year.
It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it's reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically reporting the issues you're seeing.
I would like to respectfully suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of a "propaganda machine".
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb...
I've found that link after my GF complained many times, and I've seen the CPU at more than 90% (40% in Kernel) and Firefox stuck after only her visiting Facebook and scrolling down. It was hard even to kill the Firefox. I saw bugzilla entries too. Some quadratic loops for every element, triggering recalculating "everything" even if the result shouldn't change were mentioned if I remember.
What I claim is that on 56.0.2 (the most recent version until tomorrow) is still not better, FF getting stuck and CPU being fully stressed, and that the "subscriptions" can't be the only issue (which is the only scenario that the developers accused if I remember correctly the bugzilla conversations). The computer seeing this at almost 100% CPU and Firefox remaining unresponsive has only two cores, AMD CPU. If it's accidentally "better" on 16-core machine of some developer who doesn't use the mentioned sites anyway, my girlfriend can't change it.
Of course nobody is going to give FF developers her own Facebook access for them to reproduce it.
As for my GF the most of the internet are Facebook and Youtube, I suspect she'll really have to switch to Chrome if it continues. She already did "refresh Firefox" or however it is called now more than once. No change. And she is certainly not an outlier (and regarding the slowdown I see, I type these words on Firefox 57 (I downloaded it after reading other comments about the FTP availability, I see "Stylo true (enabled by default)") on 4 core / HT Intel and typing these last lines is also quite unresponsive and my notebook fan started at maximum even if unsurprisingly for 8 virtual cores I don't see much CPU use on the indicator -- something is still obviously wrong even on the very light site like HN and on the more powerful machine -- I guarantee you I see this only in Firefox and when I use native programming editors everything flies all the time).
Naturally, like all browser engines, Gecko takes performance on popular sites such as Facebook very seriously.
I was going to comment about the slow scrolling, laggy input, and horrific experience that I have normally using Firefox. Then, I decided to try out the Nightly build.
It removes all of that.
However, it still has a horrible developer tools experience.
But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch.
1. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up native support development[1]
2. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon...
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508
[edit] corrected link
I think this might be the turning point to ditch Chrome & its parent.
I'm happy to report that Firefox 57 renders that page much more smoothly than before. Thanks! FF 57 does blank the page temporarily when I scroll quickly, though. Chromium seems to render it with no gaps at all.
Anyone else have a favorite page that Firefox doesn't like?
It now runs pretty good in FF 57. About as good as Chrome.
Then again, I remain on a 32-bit processor & OS, and I don't expect to update in the next century.
Apparently, one used to be able to manually modify Firefox's userchrome.css to do something similar, but I've yet to find descriptions on what to do with this new version of Firefox.
A different broken family of extensions that is impacted is mouse gestures, even for things like moving along tabs when hovering over them using the mouse wheel (default Chrome experience). I don't think this behaviour is possible with the new version of FF, sadly.
Under X11 there are various tools to hide the titlebar (entire chrome basically), see devilspie.
Before firefox was ugly and slow, now it's fast and slick. So glad that I'm not giving google all of my browser data anymore.
https://mail.google.com/mail/ Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to mail.google.com. Peer received a valid certificate, but access was denied. Error code: SSL_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED_ALERT
Other than that the only thing I really want is tab groups.
Servo, Mozilla Research's next-generation parallel browser engine, also has embedding as an explicit top-level goal: https://servo.org/
Edge on Windows 10 claimed to be fast, but I think that it was doing more "cheating" with the UX than actually being fast.
Downloading the new developer edition now... Hope it can stay on my dock this time!
Long live Rust! :)
I just switched to Firefox. +1 for the "do not track" feature.
There was a page with performance charts comparing it with Chrome from the FF dev team somewhere. Where is it?
Wait, how does that work again? Last I checked you couldn't deposit users at the bank or pay your rent with them.
I need to access occasionally extensions unsupported in the new version: namely Scrapbook and the extension that provides maff file support.
I’m wishing the safari team would be a bit more aggressive with pushing features and performance
FF57 gives me 483
2002: phoenix-0.1 (former name of Firebird) and Lynx
2003: Firebird-0.6 (former name of Firefox) and Lynx
2004: Firefox-1.0 and Lynx
...
2017: Firefox-57.0
and Lynx, yes.
(Two different machines, both Windows 10)
FF is fast and much lighter on RAM. My laptop is fast again. Thanks, Mozilla!
I look at the thing most of the day, looks are important just as much as speed.
Edit: Just to be clear, when I say much better, I don't mean much better than chrome, just better than it performs now. When I drop RAF and just run the rendering loop as fast as possible, they get roughly the same FPS on my cheapo laptop.
Why has Mozilla generally been so slow to react to market trends and taken so insanely long to deliver products that are competitive in other ways than fuzzy aspects like openness, freedom etc?
This goes back back all the way to like 1998. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling like they were in rebuilding mode until like 2005-2006. And then Chrome launched in 2008...
The first time around I guess it was massive amounts of technical debt and some questionable architectural choices (e.g. XPCOM), but how about the past decade?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products
In particular, check out the list of their abandoned projects. But some experimentation is necessary. You're never completely sure when you strike gold.
They had already fulfilled their primary goals (openness, transparency etc.)...
I worked at Opera Software between 2004-2015. We also got loads of Google search placement money in that period, but for all of their other faults, our exec team(s) were able to keep us hungry for more.
The extension ecosystem is great right now. A few high profile extensions aren't being ported but there are a lot of cool new extensions popping up and it's never been easier to port between browsers.
That being said, the "quantum" branding here is completely ridiculous. Quantum already had a definite meaning in computing and Firefox's "quantum era" has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's like Ford making a "hybrid" Mustang, that has zero electrification, it's just faster than all previous Mustangs.
I was honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.
Tufte referred to chartjunk - that was graphicjunk.
However... I love the browser again.